The Beginning.

I am about to embark on a new adventure. To a place I have never gone before. I am excited, and I am scared. I have felt this before, the anxiety, anticipation, awareness of something new and foreign. But this time it won't be where my passport can take me; it is more where it has already taken me that leads the adventure.

I am going to write a book.

There. I said it.

Those seem like pretty big words to me. Bold words. Words that can open up a lot of excitement and also a lot unknowns.

So, where did this crazy idea come from? Many places, really. A comment here, a discussion there, and a little bit of thought and argument with myself and others. You mix them all together, and this is what I get. The beginning of an adventure of words and worlds and thinking and writing and revising and editing and hoping and doubting and all other kinds of things that I can't even put my finger on yet.

Likatu. It is just one word right now. The Marshallese word for "beautiful". That's all I've got. But I am so passionately excited to get the rest out of my head and onto paper. To take these memories of a place so different than my own home, so outwardly ugly, known as "the butthole of Pacific", and give it a new look... hopefully one of beauty.

Will anyone want to read, let alone publish, this? I don't know. But I do know I am not doing it for the fame of being an author or to see my name on a book in Borders (although, I must admit, that would be the most amazing thing that could ever happen!). I am doing this because some people said I should, and although three years of thinking about it and then throwing the idea quickly away happened in the meantime, I think these people are right.

Remember those books we all read as kids, the great missionary stories of the selfless and hardworking people who went into the jungle to fight the tigers and demons and cannibals in order to baptize millions of souls, while never complaining about their families a few thousand miles away or the slop that they ate night after night or the tons of random bug bites covering unmentionable parts of their bodies? Well, I fought no tigers, encountered no demons, baptized none, and complained plenty. Yet I was still a missionary, and still a human. I think it is time that we show mission work for what it is: an amazing experience full of mistakes and awkwardness that leads, God-willing, both the recipient and sharer of the message a little closer to knowing Him. But definitely not because of the amazingness of the sharer, that's for sure!

So this blog is here to let me record the experience of this process. I know writing a book is going to the be one of the biggest undertakings I may ever go through. I expect to feel excited and frustrated and a whole other range of emotions that I cannot even imagine right now, and I want to record this journey. Most of all, I expect to grow, and that scares me, but at the same time feels me with butterflies of anticipation.

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. ~Toni Morrison